Whare Wānanga, Level 2, Central City Library, 44 Lorne Street, Auckland City Centre, Auckland
Saturday 16 August 2025
2pm-3pm
Cantonese merchants facilitated early Chinese immigration to New Zealand, and their social and business networks laid the foundation of the Chinese community in the South Pacific. This talk begins with revisiting New Zealand Chinese history from the Otago gold fields to frontier towns of the lower North Island, and then focuses on Chinese economic activities in Auckland before and after the completion of the Main Trunk railway line. Blending archival research on public and private records, family histories and contemporary interviews with descendants of early Chinese merchants, Dr Li provides a new view of New Zealand’s colonial past.
Dr Phoebe H. Li is an independent historian. She was the principal curator of the acclaimed photographic exhibition Being Chinese in Aotearoa held at Auckland War Memorial Museum, Waitangi Treaty Ground Museum and New Zealand Portrait Gallery between 2017 and 2020. Her research publications include A Virtual Chinatown: The Diasporic Mediasphere of Chinese Migrants in New Zealand’ (Brill, 2013), Recollections of a Distant Shore: New Zealand Chinese in Historical Images (co-authored with John B. Turner, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2017), Golden Enterprise: New Zealand Chinese Merchants 1860s-1970s (Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust, 2024) as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters both in English and Chinese.
Tāmaki Untold: conversations celebrating the taonga, stories and creativity of Auckland. A curated monthly talk series held in the Whare Wānanga hosted by Research and Heritage Services, Auckland Libraries.
Ticketholders are kindly asked to extend the courtesy of cancelling tickets if they are no longer able to attend, so tickets can be released to others.
More information can be found here.